Re: On User Interface, again..

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 12 Oct 2001, Raphael Bosshard wrote:

> People expect major changes for Gnome 2.0. These changes are here, for
> the underlying libraries, for gtk, pango and so on. But from what i
> heard until now, not for the UI.
> 
> I dont have much experience in programming. I can code c, i even
> programed some gtk-applications and some stupid little sdl-games, but
> thats it. I see gnome from a user-perspecive. and from this perspecive
> gnome is a bis... well.. disappointing. gtkText and gtkTree will change.
> But the new text-selector wont get into gnome 2.0 and all other things
> (i'm a user, remeber. no develpoer) will stay as they are.
> Don't do that. Don't disappoint the user base.

Look, it's as simple as this. If get get a 2.0 release out, but there are 
details in it that people feel can be better, they can be fixed, in the 
next (minor) release. In fact people will install it, use it, get 
irritated and fix it. This is the cycle of free software.

On the other hand, if we continue to push out the release dates to work on 
features, we will never get a release out, nobody will use the parts we've 
finished, developers cannot use new features because users don't have the 
libraries installed, nobody will work on Gnome 2 (seriously, almost nobody 
is working on it now, we have no chance of adding feature, we hardly have 
time to port it). This will lead to people migrating from gnome, 
distributions will stop shipping it, and Gnome will die.

Remember. This is free software. Release *early*, release *often*. This is 
the core of free software, and the reason it works. If we fail to do this, 
our software will not be used and therefore not improved, and it will 
DIE. We (the Gnome project) are extremely bad at this. Chances are that 
KDE gets out both 2.0 and 3.0 before we ever get to release 2.0.

/ Alex